In an unprecedented accusation, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Juan Martín Paleo asserts that Juan Battaleme, Secretary of International Defense Affairs, assured the United Kingdom that the new fighters do not pose a threat to its interests in the Malvinas. Paleo describes the purchase as a symbol of a "policy of submission" and "willful impotence."

Retired Lieutenant General Juan Martín Paleo , who until recently commanded the Argentine military, made a serious public accusation against the Secretary of International Affairs at the Ministry of Defense, Juan Battaleme , for the Malvinas en la Mira website. He accused him of being a "traitor to the country" for managing the acquisition of F-16 fighter jets under premises that, according to him, explicitly guarantee that they will not harm the British "occupying power" in the Malvina Islands.

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Paleo's central accusation is based on Battaleme's statements to a British think tank , in which the Petri and Milei administration official claimed that the F-16s pose no threat to UK weapons systems in the South Atlantic and that the US would act as guarantor of that "harmlessness." For the former military chief, this is not a technical detail, but rather "a confession of a planned capitulation."

Paleo was blunt in his analysis of the meaning of this statement: "A confession by the parties relieves the evidence," he declared, underscoring the obscenity of an official celebrating the purchase of "a castrated weapon, incapable of projecting real power" and of warning the power usurping our territory of this. He asserts that this is the first time a government has not only acknowledged, but also publicized, "the voluntary impotence of its most symbolic tool of defense."

Beyond Battaleme's controversial statement and Paleo's considerations , these acquisitions are framed within a context of chronic disinvestment in the Armed Forces. An internal Air Force report describes a national aeronautical infrastructure in a state of disrepair: obsolete machinery, cracked runways, and deteriorating hangars . It notes that the equipment budget is being reduced to asphyxiating levels, to the point that, with current operating costs, each F-16 could fly barely two hours a year.

For Paleo , these planes become "steel ghosts in ghost bases," an empty mise-en-scène.

The former Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Argentine Armed Forces contrasted this situation with the speed with which funds were authorized to finance the presence of foreign troops in joint exercises, such as "Operation Trident" with the United States, while national geostrategic projects, such as the Ushuaia Naval Base, were paralyzed and the Antarctic project was abandoned.

Paleo's complaint aims to expose what he defines as "a complete architecture of subjugation," where the purchase of weapons becomes a symbol of its own uselessness and disinvestment guarantees structural impotence.

He concludes that, for certain political sectors, national defense is not a pillar of independence, but rather "a field of empty gestures and calculated concessions" that override the Malvinas cause in an act that, he hopes, history will judge harshly.